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GCloud updates capabilities with Anthos enhancements
Mon, 31st Aug 2020
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Google Cloud has announced several new capabilities for Anthos, a core component of its new Cloud App Modernization Program, or Google CAMP.

AI for hybrid environments

Google Cloud has launched hybrid AI capabilities for Anthos, allowing organisations to use differentiated AI technologies wherever workloads reside.

With AI on-prem, AI workloads can be run securely, nearer to data as well as simplifying the development process by providing access to AI technology on-prem.

Speech-to-Text On-Prem, is now generally available on Anthos through the Google Cloud Marketplace.

It provides full control over speech data that is protected by data residency and compliance requirements with five supported languages and more to come.

Services

GCloud is also launching Anthos attached clusters, for managing Kubernetes clusters with the Anthos control plane, including centralised management for configuration and service mesh capabilities.

Anthos for bare metal is now in beta, which lets Anthos run on-prem and at edge locations without a hypervisor.

Google is an early adopter for Anthos for bare metal, working towards using it as a platform to run containers internally for production workloads.

Development

Cloud Code Integrated Development Environment (IDE) plugins have been united with Cloud Run for Anthos.

This allows the building of serverless applications directly from IDEs like VS Code and Intellij. Supported languages include Java, Node.js, Python and Go.

The new Cloud Code-Cloud Run emulator allows for validation of local changes on a user's own machine, with automated re-deploys on every saved code change.

The emulator can also locally debug Cloud Run apps.

When code is ready, changes can be pushed directly to a remote dev environment in the cloud from the IDE.

Additionally, Kubernetes clusters can be created with Cloud Code with Cloud Run for Anthos enabled from within the IDE, pre-populating key details like project ID, zone/region, number of nodes, etc.

Identity security

GCloud is also launching Anthos Identity Service, to extend existing identity solutions to work with Anthos workloads.

With support for OpenID Connect, (generally available on-prem and in beta for Anthos on AWS), existing identity investments can be leveraged to enable consistency across environments. Support for additional protocols will be added in the coming months.

New Anthos security blueprints provide best practices in a templated format for needs such as auditing and monitoring, policy enforcement and enforcing locality restrictions.

Anthos security blueprints also provide purpose-built solutions to automate governance, compliance and data residency for regulated industries such as financial services, retail and public sector.

Migration

New capabilities are able to make migrating workloads to Anthos easier, even without the source code.

Migrate for Anthos now provides build migration automation using the new CRD-based API to integrate with your custom processes and tooling.

This enables several new features:

  • Support for Anthos deployed on-prem to convert VMs running on-prem. 
  • Support for Windows containers, now in beta.
  • Integration into the Google Cloud Console web admin UI.

A new migration feature has been added to aid with migrating workloads from Cloud Foundry using Kf on Anthos, which presents developers with a Cloud Foundry-like interface on top of Anthos.